Tag Archives: Judaism

Star Wars has always drawn a connection between the Empire and the Nazis. From the very beginning, the franchise presented images of Grand Moff Tarkin and his officers, replete with enforcers dubbed “stormtroopers,” wearing uniforms that likened them to the men who served Hitler. It’s a visual choice that’s meant to tell the audience who the Empire is at a single glance, without needing to unpack the details that the franchise would explore in the ensuing decades.

I’ve written about The Citizen Kane Effect — the idea that sometimes a work hailed as a classic can do something so innovative and so essential within the medium, that its techniques become woven into the fabric of how later works present themselves. As a result, modern audiences may consume the original work and walk away unimpressed because the great strides of the past have become commonplace in the present day.

But there’s another, similar phenomenon that can prove challenging to the appreciation of great art. Works within any medium or genre can become such classics that they ascend almost into myth, becoming iconic to the point that even critics and devoted fans forget about the real, warts-and-all work that once earned the lavish praise and became the fodder for that myth-making.